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C++ Graphics and...

Yeah, I have two questions here.
My first one, If I wanted to write a C++ program and have it contain graphics, am I going to have to use something besides your average compiler, like Dev? I was reading about it, and I think I would have use something like OpenGL or DirectX. I dont know what those are and/or how to use them? If anyone could explain some basic information about that, that would be great.

Second question, I remember back when I was learning QBASIC that we had made a program like pong. Well, I was wondering how to do something like that in C++. Mainly, All I want to know is how would I use the keyboard for interaction. I have been doing some searching, and all I have found is stuff on Visual C++, and I havent used that, nor do I plan to for a while. I was wondering like the ASCII value of left arrow. Say we were playing pong. How would I make a | move when the user presses a button, which out having like a cin&gt;&gt; statement.
Anywayz, I hope you understand what I am trying to ask, and thanks for any help.

I think that graphics programming in C++ is going to be a lot harder for you than QBASIC, but if you are interested, you should search the web for some directx or opengl tutorials.

As to what these are, DirectX is an api (application programmer interface) written by microsoft to attempt to make programming with windows easier (it enables you to write programs that use sound, video, etc without having to write separate code for each piece of hardware that a user might choose to use). What you do is find functions in the directx library that do what you want to do. I can't really explain it better than that.

I'm not sure of an actual definition of opengl, but I believe it is a technology that allows you to interact with graphics hardware without knowing the specifics of the individual hardware (much like the graphics parts of directx).

Before you look at directx and opengl tutorials, you might want to search on google for some basic windows tutorials, because you are not going to get very far with directx without knowing how to program for windows.